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April 28 is International Workers’ Memorial Day, a day of mourning for persons killed or injured in the workplace. Every year, hundreds of workers are injured or die on the job. The APTS highlights this day of mourning by paying tribute to victims and to their loved ones, who also suffer the consequences of injury or death.

We hope this day will help open up a space for reflection on our collective responsibility to create a safe and healthy workplace. New forms of prevention and participation set out in the Act to modernize the occupational health and safety regime will help further this goal. However, work still needs to be done to establish a shared culture of prevention that will help us truly take charge of workers’ health and safety.

Let’s commit to making prevention a priority

The APTS would like to emphasize once again that prevention must be a top priority for health and social service institutions. What can we do to make our workplace safe and healthy? Here are some suggestions:

• Keep informed – be curious.
• Denounce risk situations affecting you or your colleagues.
• Fill out incident or accident reports and encourage your colleagues to do the same.
• If there’s a problem, call on your local union team.
• Ask questions about situations, tasks, and changes.
• Be willing to refuse a task when the situation calls for it.
• Help identify risks in your workplace.
• Meet your local union team and join in activities.
• Take care of yourself.
• Don’t accept any kind of reprisals when you’ve exercised one of your rights.

We urge you to look at the occupational health and safety section of the APTS website to find out about your rights, and to contact your local team today to learn more about what you can do about occupational health and safety issues that are of concern to you.

To share:

• Fact sheet Don’t jeopardize your health 
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• Poster 

Source: The APTS occupational health and safety prevention sector